<p>As someone looking to make a real difference in the lives of patients suffering from disease , there is a lot you can do beyond publishing papers. It takes an average of 17 years to go from research finding to clinical implementation. This means that ground-breaking discoveries will not matter much if no one picks up the mantle to carry those discoveries forward. It’s hard to become the kind of leader who drives research findings forward into clinical application. It used to be that through each step of the process there were people with different skill sets and they could work in relative isolation. That’s no longer the case. Everyone now has to work together in a coordinated manner at the same time. The science, technology, and societal impact of advances in healthcare have become so complex that without leaders pushing everyone to work together many advances get stuck in what the entrepreneurial world calls the “valley of death”. The problem is that in healthcare it is literally
